1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to database management. More particularly, the present invention relates to updating information stored in a database corresponding to a changed network address or a changed web page.
2. Description of the Related Art
It is well known to couple a plurality of computer systems into a network of computer systems. In this way, the collective resources available within the network may be shared amongst users, thus allowing each connected user to enjoy resources which would not be economically feasible to provide to each user individually. With the growth of the Internet, sharing of computer resources has been brought to a much wider audience. The Internet has become a cultural medium in today's society for both information and entertainment. Government agencies employ Internet sites for a variety of informational purposes. For many companies, one or more Internet sites are an integral part of their business; these sites are frequently mentioned in the companies' television, radio and print advertising.
A Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) is a way for identifying a point of content on a network, such as the Internet. The content may be a page of text, a video or sound clip, a still or animated image, or a program. The most common form of URI is the Web page address, which is a particular form or subset of URI called a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). A URI typically describes the mechanism used to access the resource, the specific computer that the resource is housed in, and the specific name of the resource (e.g., a file name) on the computer. A URL is the address of a resource (e.g., file) accessible on the Internet. The type of resource depends on the Internet application protocol. Using the World Wide Web's protocol, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the resource can be a Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) page, an image file, a program such as a Java applet, or any other file supported by HTTP. The URL contains the name of the protocol required to access the resource (e.g., HTTP), a domain name that identifies a specific computer on the Internet (e.g., www.ibm.com), and a hierarchical description of a file location on the computer (e.g., /products).
The World Wide Web, or simply “the Web”, is the Internet's multimedia information retrieval system. It is the most commonly used method of transferring data in the Internet environment. Other methods exist such as the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and Gopher, but have not achieved the popularity on the Web. Retrieval of information is generally achieved by the use of an HTML-compatible browser at a client machine. When the user of the browser on a client machine specifies a link via a URL, the client machine issues a request to a naming service to map a hostname in the URL to a particular network Internet Protocol (IP) address at which the server is located. The naming service returns a list of one or more IP addresses that can respond to the request. Using one of the IP addresses, the browser establishes a connection to a server. If the server is available, it returns a document or other object formatted according to HTML, for example. Web browsers have become the primary interface for access to many network and server services.
Many web pages are built dynamically from information stored in databases. For instance, when a client machine sends a request for a particular web page, the server for the web page may retrieve contents that make up the web page from a plurality of different locations in a database or from a plurality of different locations in different databases/servers. Also, URLs (or network addresses) that are often used as links on given web pages are stored in databases, for example, using the DATALINK type which is available on the AS/400 from IBM. The server for the web page relies on the accuracy of the stored URLs in its database to provide expeditious retrieval of the contents and to avoid delays which may result from invalid URLs or from URLs having re-direct meta tags or re-direct indicators. However, many of the links (e.g., URLs) stored in databases are apt to change over time because web sites move around from time to time. Furthermore, manually updating information in the database is time consuming and often impractical.
Therefore, a need exists for a method to keep information in a database accurate and up to date. It would be desirable to utilize information from a user's browsing session to update information in a database. Furthermore, it would be desirable to keep information in the database tables up to date without requiring manual intervention.